The minds of corvids, and tigers

Two books in my study caught my eye the other day. The first was this, which I bought secondhand some time ago but haven't read yet:

It's called Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-birds. The subtitle caught my eye because of The Tinleys. In that story, the two knights named Tinley are pursuing a griffin and end up on an island inhabited by numerous "griffin" (bird/mammal hybrid) species, from the diminutive titmouse (half tit, half mouse) to the domestic short-tailed chow (chicken-cow). The "wolf-birds" of Heinrich's subtitle would obviously fit right in.

In writing the above paragraph, I popped over to Bruce Charlton's blog so that I could get a link to his "Great Tits" post, and I found that his latest post there -- very recent, as it wasn't there this morning Taiwan time -- is about corvids and their remarkable minds: "Won-over by magpies in Newcastle upon Tyne," in which he mentions "that magpies (and Corvids generally) were indeed one of the most intelligent of native British birds." I had already given this post its title before seeing Bruce's post. The magpie is a black-and-white corvid, like the pied crow in my Odessa Grigorievna dream. In Britain it is, anyway; in this part of the world, the magpies are blue:

Also as I was writing the above, I had a vague memory of having mentioned Mind of the Raven on this blog before, and even noting "wolf-birds" in connection with griffins, but I guess it was in the comments, as a search came up empty. Looking at my posts tagged "Corvids," though, led me to "Precognitive dream: Carrying a pet in a room where it's raining" (August 2022), where one of my comments referenced tigers and William Blake:

Tigers are part of this, too . . . . My hippie uncle, also called William Tychonievich, used to rock and roll under the stage name Billy Tyger, a handle intended to reference both his (our) own name and William Blake. One of Blake’s Proverbs of Hell is "The crow wished everything was black; the owl that everything was white."

As you will read below, I had already been thinking about tigers and William Blake, and had already decided to put the Blake/tiger syncs in the same post as the corvid syncs, before discovering that comment.

The other book that caught my eye was one of the many secondhand children's books my wife bought in bulk some years ago: The Ghost of Fossil Glen by Cynthia DeFelice. This was also vaguely griffin-adjacent -- I am currently reading Adrienne Mayor's book The First Fossil Hunters, in which she makes the case that Protoceratops fossils in Scythia gave rise to the griffin of legend. The word glen also got my attention because it recently appeared in "'Come buy,' call the goblins" -- the next line after that being "Hobbling down the glen."

I read The Ghost of Fossil Glen today and, out of idle curiosity, looked up what else Cynthia DeFelice had written. A picture book about a highly intelligent corvid, it turns out:

This afternoon, I had some free time, so I went for a brief hike on Eight Trigrams Mountain, this being the perfect time of year to go there. We don't get much in the way of autumn foliage on this subtropical island, but sometimes I still get the chance, like Humpty Dumpty, to look down on a multicolored forest canopy.

As I was walking, for some reason one of William Blake's Proverbs of Hell popped into my mind: "The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction." Seconds after thinking of that out of the blue, I rounded a bend in the trail and passed a couple walking with their young son. The boy was wearing a T-shirt with a cute cartoon picture of a tiger, helpfully captioned, in English, "TIGER CUTE."

The tiger was a bit of a sync, obviously, but I thought at first that a cute tiger was still rather far removed from Blake's menacing "tygers of wrath." A moment's reflection, though, reminded me that the word cute had originally meant "shrewd, discerning, clever" -- i.e., wise, like Blake's tygers.

A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask

I had two strange, rather detailed dreams last night, which I document here in case they should turn out to be significant:

⁂

I dreamed that I was with a "friend," a man, whose identity was not clearly defined. We were outside and saw in the distance some kind of large carcass with carrion birds flocking around it. My friend pointed out one unusual-looking corvid, which I identified as a pied crow, an African species.

My friend wanted to get a closer look at the birds. As we got closer, it became clear that one of them was a vulture, a really enormous vulture, bigger than a man. Was it a condor, I wondered? Was it Garuda? But no, it was unmistakably an African white-backed vulture, only many times larger.

We got too close to the vulture, and it chased us for some time, on foot for some reason. Eventually, though, its aggression dissipated, and we began to think of it as our friend.

"Do you have a name?" I asked.

"No," the vulture replied telepathically. "I don't have a name."

"We usually use names here," I said. "Do you mind if we call you Sally? Wait, first are you a boy or a girl?"

"A girl," she said, and now she looked like a middle-aged Russian woman, not a vulture. She didn't want to be called Sally, though, as it was an embarrassing reminder that she had been a vulture when we found her. She explained this by telepathically conveying an image of a skull with several teeth missing. I figured that among scavengers "bald-headed Sally" (from the Little Richard song) was slang for a carcass that had been picked clean. (Why I thought of this, rather than of the obvious fact that vultures are themselves bald-headed, beats me.)

If not Sally, what should we call her? Any random female name, I guess, like Odessa or something.

Before I could say anything, she said, "Actually, my real name is Odessa someone's-daughter."

I told her I had just been thinking of Odessa as a random name we could give her and what an astonishing coincidence that was. (Somehow I didn't make the connection that she was telepathic.) She was being cagey about her patronymic, but I was sure I could guess that, too: She was Odessa Grigorievna.

I didn't tell her I knew her patronymic.

"Okay," I said. "We'll just call you Odessa. That's good because it sounds like Odyssey, and we can tell people that we call you that because we met at the -- uh, the Achilles, uh, the Iliad --"

"At the 2001 Odyssey Fencing Club," she put in. Fine, we'd go with that.

⁂

In a second dream the same night, I was Jim Carrey playing Joseph Smith, who had come back from the dead and was trying to sneak into his own house, which had been inherited by Martin Harris, who was played by Alan Rickman. Even though these were American characters, I understood that the whole thing was set in Russia.

The above-ground portion of the house was in ruins, and Martin Harris and his wife lived in the basement. I was trying to figure out how to get into the basement but couldn't find the entrance. Then I heard voices and saw that the Harrises were coming out. This showed me where the entrance was, so now I just had to hide until they left and then go down there. I crouched down in the shadows, confident that they wouldn't see me because it wasn't in the script.

The Harrises were dressed all in black and looked like necromancers or something. They were talking in a way that seemed very unnatural but was designed to fill in the viewer on necessary background information. A poorly written script, I thought.

Martin said something abut Joseph Smith III, complaining about him, and his wife said, "Why do you still call him 'the third'? His father's been dead for so long it's scarcely necessary."

"I know," said Martin, "but we're on a first-met basis." I understood this to mean that he had to continue calling him what he had been called when they first met, which was Joseph Smith III.

"As you know," said Mrs. Harris, "we inherited this house from him. And I've never complained, and I don't even mind trying to pay off the debts we also inherited from him." As Joseph Smith, I knew they'd also inherited a massive treasure from me -- I hadn't been such a failure at money-digging as commonly supposed -- but they didn't know where it was.

As Mrs. Harris said this, she went up to a large round table on the ruined first floor, which was covered with a black tablecloth, and began making perpendicular cuts into the cloth with a pair of scissors. I realized they were going to be here for a while.

For some reason, I decided that I'd better move from my current hiding place and hide on the table, under the tablecloth. I somehow did this without Mrs. Harris noticing, but now the problem was that she was making more and more cuts in the cloth, which was bound to expose me sooner or later.

Finally, so much of the tablecloth had been cut away that all that was left was a small black cloth covering the upper part of my face -- like Batman's mask -- with four long strips hanging off to either side like the legs of a spider. It looked like I was wearing some kind of Halloween mask intended to make my head look like a spider.

I stood up and was able to see myself from a third-person point of view: Jim Carrey, wearing this ridiculous black spider mask.

"Look, Martin," I said, "It's me, Joseph!"

"You don't look like him," Martin said -- and then proceeded to ignore me completely, as if masked strangers showed up in his house all the time.

"No, look, it's me," I insisted.

"Nope. I remember what he looked like, and he never wore a spider mask."

⁂

Note added (7:20 p.m. same day):

About four hours after posting the above, I clicked on a webm version of a TikTok video on 4chan. The webm had no sound, but apparently the original had background music, which was credited with this text at the bottom:

Apparently there's an American electronic music group called Odesza (a nice compromise among the Russian, Ukrainian, and Hungarian spellings!) that did a remix of something from another musician called Zhu. Looking both acts up just now, I find that Zhu was born Steven Zhu on April 28, 1989, so I've posted this on his birthday.

I thought running into a form of Odessa -- and as the name of some people, not a city -- was quite the coincidence. 

His Dark Dove

William Wright's latest post, "A Numenorean Flying Ship," discusses Jeff Bezos's latest spaceship launch -- of a phallic rocket called New Shepard and decorated with an enormous black feather (even though Blue Origin's logo is, naturally enough, a blue feather). One of William's fellow Mormon-Tolkien-crossover thinkers has written of the Black Feathers as a group of Númenorean baddies, and William has been exploring the idea of Númenor (Tolkien's star-shaped island divided into the regions Andustar, Forostar, Orrostar, Hyarnustar, and Hyarrostar) as a heavenly body rather than a literal island. He quotes some of Tolkien's posthumously published notes suggesting that he had once toyed with the idea of spacefaring Elves and Númenoreans. This one in particular caught my eye:

For upon the Straight Road only the gods could walk, and only the ships of the Elves could journey; for being straight that road passed through the air of breath and flight and rose above it, and traversed Ilmen [outer space] in which no mortal flesh can endure.

The phrase Straight Road is here used to refer to space travel. This is interesting vis-à-vis New Shepard's black feather. When, a few months before the birdemic, I began a post with the word corvids, that post was called "Birds that go straight" and characterized the crow as one such because "'As the crow flies' means in a straight line." In my December 2020 post "Red crows of the sun," I discuss my childhood idea that crows and all other black-feathered birds are actually from outer space.

William Wright is far from the first to connect bald Bezos and his phallic rocket with Dr. Evil in the second Austin Powers movie (whose phallic rocket I recently referenced in "Sometimes a banana is just a banana," though William didn't catch it).

There are more parallels. Dr. Evil has a son named Scott Evil. Bezos has a son with a woman named Scott. Bezos named his rocket after Alan Shepard. Dr. Evil's rocket was part of a program named after Alan Parsons. Bezos's company is called Blue Origin. Dr. Evil sings "What if God was one of us? Blue blue blue blue blue blue blue." I'm telling you, these are some top-shelf coincidences!

My last post included the Ava Max music video for "Kings & Queens"; this begins with footage of white doves in flight, which are later replaced with parrots in the rest of the video. Parrots replacing doves made me think of my favorite Flaubert story, "A Simple Heart," which ends with the Holy Ghost appearing in the form of a parrot. With this context of subverted holy-dove imagery, Bezos's black feather made me think of the Tori Amos song "Black-Dove (January)," the lyrics of which apparently came to her in a dream:

I used to vaguely connect this song with the Waco massacre of 1993, since the lyrics repeatedly mention Texas, and David Koresh is an anagram of His Dark Dove. Listening to it again now, I notice other things:

Black-dove black-dove

You don't need a space ship

They don't know you've already lived

On the other side of the galaxy 

She had a January world

So many storms not right somehow

How a lion becomes a mouse

By the woods

But I have to get to Texas

Said I have to get to Texas

And I'll give away my blue blue dress

Notice how the black dove is associated with space travel (all black birds are from outer space), and there's also mention of a "blue blue dress" (cf. the blue robes of the spacefaring "wizards"). "How a lion becomes a mouse / By the woods" is interesting, too. Satan is called a roaring lion in the Bible, but William Wright has recently been connecting "Satan-Saruman" (his term) with the rat or mouse. I recently posted about a sinister mouse in the woods.

The most interesting and unexpected link has to do with Koresh himself, though. Remember that this post began with the Texas launch of a penis-shaped spaceship called New Shepard. Today I learned that before they were called Branch Davidians, the Waco group had a different name:

Shepherd's Rod.

Precognitive dream: Carrying a pet in a room where it's raining

Last night I had a dream that I picked up my black tomcat Scipio and carried him upstairs to my study on the second floor. When I entered the study, I found that it was raining hard outside and the roof was leaking (which makes no sense on the second floor of a three-story house, but that's dream logic!), so much so that it was basically "raining" in the study, too. Water had gotten all over everything. Fortunately, my second-floor bookcases are actually cabinets with glass doors, so I figured the books themselves would be okay, but I would still have to clean up everything else. I carried Scipio downstairs and then went back up to the study to clean. When I opened the door the second time, though, everything was dry, so I decided cleaning was unnecessary.

A short vignette followed in which I had stopped at a food stand on the side of a dusty road but had decided not to buy anything because the food (Taiwanese-style luwei, various braised dishes) was all soft and overcooked and just didn't look very appetizing. I was getting ready to pull back onto the main road when I noticed a man standing there holding a stop sign. It was a bit smaller than a normal stop sign, and it wasn't fixed in the ground, so I wasn't quite sure if I was legally required to stop or not. Then he turned the sign around so that I could see the back surface, on which someone had painted by hand "IRAQ WAR." I decided it must just be some dude protesting the war in Iraq, not a legal stop sign, so with some hesitation I pulled out onto the road. It was really very dusty, and the landscape seemed to be some kind of sandy desert environment. I drove a short distance up a hill and came to a little house made of corrugated metal, with a covered carport in the front. Some people were sitting out in the carport area preparing food -- cutting and washing vegetables or something like that. One of them was an old woman who looked Chinese but spoke with a New York Jewish accent. She was saying, "I've always been a great admirer of your country's war in Iraq -- both of them, in fact. I think you guys were heroes. And you know the other thing I admire about your country? You never ask Jewish children to sit on the floor. You always provide these little stools for them."

⁂

In the morning, I checked my blog comments. WanderingGondola had written:

On the bus home, headphones still cranking, I read through the then-freshly-posted "Michael the glove puppet and X the Owl". As my stop drew closer I saw the bus windscreen wipers move once, though rain wasn't evident; at roughly the same time, my music player put on Outkast's Ms. Jackson. The relevance of "Jackson" should be obvious, but there's also a repeated "ooh" in the song chorus that always sounded more like "hoo" to me. And yes, there's an owl or two in the video; one specifically mouths (beak-syncs?) to an "ooh".

As I got off the bus, I realised it was indeed raining lightly. Over the past month there's been several instances of this, as if the sky decided, "Hey, you're almost home, let's turn on the water." As I pulled out my umbrella and began walking, the rain's intensity increased. Just as it seemed it couldn't get any heavier, it eased off significantly -- around the same time that Andre 3000 rapped out, "You can plan a pretty picnic but you can't control the weather" (2:20 in the video). A very weird coincidence.

Mulling over this later, I recalled Wikipedia's notes on how, in Islam, the Archangel is "said to effectuate God's providence as well as natural phenomena, such as rain." That links rather well to that Michael graffiti from earlier, which has "inshallah" ("if God wills" in Arabic) written above everything else. 

I noted the coincidence of her having a rain-related sync and my dream about rain. It wasn't until later that I actually watched the video for "Ms. Jackson," though, and realized that the connection was much deeper than just "rain."

Starting around the 2:13 mark, we see André 3000 in a room where the roof is leaking so much that it is basically raining indoors. He is trying to put out jars and pots and things to catch all the rain -- all while carrying a pet in one hand. At first I thought he was carrying a cat in a few shots, but on viewing it again, I think it's always a dog or puppy. There's a cat in the room the whole time, too, though. (We also see an owl several times. André 3000's other famous song is of course Hey Ya -- which means "black crow/raven" in Chinese.)

In the second part of my dream, there is a stop sign that isn't fixed in the ground, and I am unsure as to whether I need to stop. This afternoon, Debbie left this comment:

On Feb 24, 1979 Johnnie Wilder at the height of Heatwave's success, was in Dayton to visit his mother and father and his car that he was driving was broadsided at a 4 way stop. The Stop sign had fallen previously and wasn't replaced.

⁂

Update: In the comments, Henri notes the Outkast song "B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)." How had I never heard of this song?

So I posted about how a dream of mine synched with an Outkast song mentioned in my comments the next day. In the vignette that followed the main dream, I was driving a car and saw a man apparently protesting a war in Iraq by holding up a sign that said "STOP" on one side and "IRAQ WAR" on the other. Now I discover that Outkast also had a song called "Bombs Over Baghdad," and that the music video features people driving around in cars and a giant "STOP."

I also discovered today that, years after using an eagle owl in the "Ms. Jackson" video, Outkast member Big Boi began keeping owls as pets, leading Rolling Stone to do a thing about "Big Boi's Owl Obsession."